I was asked to write so I write:) Indian people have gone through a long love affair with the Bahai community. They are our best friends, our most stalwart companions. In the 60s and 70s there was mass conversion. Some communities like Poormans reserve (now Kawacatoose) became 80 percent Bahai. Pasqua First Nation and others had many members who were keenly interested in the Bahai Faith and became Bahais. These two bands were more or less representative of the reaction to the Bahai Faith by First Nations people in Canada and the United States. Pasqua First Nation recently acknowledged 50 years of Bahai Faith involvement. Many of the first Indian believers in these communities were the ceremonial people. People who had never given up their traditional ways and had never become Christian. They could not become Christian because that would mean giving up their Indian ways which they were adamantly reluctant to do. Becoming a Bahai did not require them to renounce their old ways as a matter of fact their traditional beliefs were respected and acknowledged to be from the Creator by the Bahai community. The prophecy within the Bahai Faith that The Indian people of the Americas will someday shed light upon the world resonated with the Indian people as they always knew their ways were astoundingly mysterious and beautiful. Inwardly these Indian people knew they had something the rest of the world seemed to be lacking. It can be said that the 60s and 70s were the heyday of the Bahai Faith in these communities. After time the Bahai Faith seemed to wane in influence and people drifted away. Many of these elders did not pass the teachings of the Bahai Faith onto their children or grandchildren. In many of these communities the number of Indigenous Bahais have steadily declined. There is a core set of believers in these communities. Usually it is one family that has kept alive a flickering flame. This flame has also been kept alive by visiting non Indigenous Bahais. In the Indigenous communities there is now a resistance to any outside religion as more and more of the old Indian ways are disappearing with the loss of traditional elders and the people are even more desperate to hang onto their traditions. With the loss of their traditions these communities are experiencing even more social turmoil than before. The Bahai Faith with all of its great teachings of unity of mankind, respect for all religions and cultures, equality of men and women, agreement between science and religion, abolishment of extremes of wealth and poverty are attractive to Indian people but they will not wholeheartedly enter or join the Bahai Faith without their own teachings. The teachings of the Bahai Faith must be made to connect with the innermost fundamental beliefs of the Indigenous peoples if we are ever to achieve sustained development and growth.
Posted on: Mon, 10 Mar 2014 17:03:03 +0000
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